Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 409 posts

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#111

Post by borski »

avianlyric wrote: post #106
borski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That mechanism has been used to change laws - in your lifetime, on this side of the century. I have no bone to pick, not knowing anything about the royal family, but do you have any examples of this happening?

There’s a number of UK laws with odd carve-outs for the royal family. A notable one is the Equality Act where there is a carve-out that allows the Royal family to discriminate with its hiring practices in a way that would be illegal for any other organisation. I don’t think there are any examples of significant changes to provisional laws, but certainly tweaks to make sure the royal family doesn’t have to keep with t…

Oh, sure - that I’d believe. The royal family has historically been the prototype for “above the law.”

But I meant I wasn’t aware of any cases in which (in our lifetimes or relatively recently) the royal family had put their thumb on the scale of a law and had it modified in a way that changed it for the general citizenry of the UK.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#112

Post by windexh8er »

semiquaver wrote: post #4

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…

The best part is that the US of A is cool with allowing organizations to encrypt things that should be freely available to the public (OTA broadcast TV & public services radio networks). In the case of OTA broadcast the American taxpayer is being abused by having to deal with corporate America using open airwaves for profit while those same corporations hoover up all kinds of hand outs in subsidies. Yet when encryption is in the best interest of the American citizen, and there's no lobbyist in some politicians pocket - well, then... Then it's not acceptable because: enter national security / child porn / drugs as an inarguable rationale.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#113

Post by Mountain_Skies »

domador wrote: post #54
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time, but won't necessarily be that way to future generations. Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the future…

Quite often, we can't even get lawmakers to include the concept of inflation into the laws, so any fine or penalty with a set amount ends up being decayed into nothing over time.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#114

Post by Mountain_Skies »

safety1st wrote: post #32
semiquaver wrote: post #4

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…

Then these governments have forgotten that they serve at the pleasure of the people. We permit them to exist specifically for the purpose of protecting our rights, not expanding their own. The rights we possess are inherent and automatic because we're human beings, they are not granted by government or anyone else, and if a government fails to aid us in preserving them, that government is no longer legitimate. Jeffer…

We live in an era where increasingly it is the government who picks the voters rather than the voters picking the government. Whether it is through immigration policy, favoring certain areas over others, or trying to throw up restrictions on voting, across the political spectrum there is a dedicated effort to shape the electorate to be friendly to those in power remaining in power.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#115

Post by hammock »

varenc wrote: post #108
hammock wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. Can you explain why? I have already given a historical example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one based on similar true accounts) The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that they “cou…

How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented practical tracking for every day transactions? Is there a single historical example of this being done in the pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people/household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency is several orders of magnitude more records. I can’t really think of any practical way this could have been done, especially when assuming some peo…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#116

Post by mcpackieh »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #25
Xarodon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we just being obtuse now? Is that what we're doing?

The alternative is the UK drafting people to fight in ukraine, which also makes 0 sense?

Obviously the concern is an escalation of that war which pulls NATO into the conflict fully. I don't believe that's a likely scenario, but being deliberately obtuse isn't the right way address that somebody expressing that concern.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#117

Post by raincom »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #114
safety1st wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then these governments have forgotten that they serve at the pleasure of the people. We permit them to exist specifically for the purpose of protecting our rights, not expanding their own. The rights we possess are inherent and automatic because we're human beings, they are not granted by government or anyone else, and if a government fails to aid us in preserving them, that government is no longer legitimate. Jeffer…

We live in an era where increasingly it is the government who picks the voters rather than the voters picking the government. Whether it is through immigration policy, favoring certain areas over others, or trying to throw up restrictions on voting, across the political spectrum there is a dedicated effort to shape the electorate to be friendly to those in power remaining in power.

Selectorate theory (which is described for the lay people in "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics") talks about your points: picking voters through (a) immigration policy (b) restrictions on voting, etc.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#118

Post by rcarr »

domador wrote: post #54
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…

Society should require that the spirit and purpose of any law be included as a preamble to that law's text and be used in the interpretation, application, and future adaptation of that law. The spirit and purpose may be obvious at the time, but won't necessarily be that way to future generations. Laws with no explanation about their purpose or goals are like the compiled binaries of a program. Ideally, in the future…

To me, the law and programming seem very similar. Any time two parties go to court and a precedent is created, it seems to me like someone is taking the function of the contested law and adding an if statement somewhere in the body that alters what's returned. Having something like this would be akin to having the original ticket specification to look at which is obviously handy when the inevitable disagreements arise between users, developers and stake holders. It may also prevent the law from getting needlessly complex with endless if statements.

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#119

Post by _jal »

varenc wrote: post #108
hammock wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The inverse claim, “people using gold coins thousands of years ago for common exchange were worried about the anonymity of their transactions”, is absurd. Can you explain why? I have already given a historical example to the contrary (granted a fictional one but one based on similar true accounts) The ancient Romans invented the Census to reliably track every person. It seems a little goofy to suggest that they “cou…

How would the Romans, or anyone else, have implemented practical tracking for every day transactions? Is there a single historical example of this being done in the pre-digital world? The Census is a survey of people/household/assets, but logging all exchanges of currency is several orders of magnitude more records. I can’t really think of any practical way this could have been done, especially when assuming some peo…

If you're actually asking,

https://online.maryville.edu/blog/history-of-accounting/

Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

#120

Post by zug_zug »

immibis wrote: post #83
andy_ppp wrote: post #10

Who persuades politicians it’s a good idea for the security services to be able to scan all their messages? I am absolutely certain that the politicians have absolutely no clue what they’re being asked to implement.

Oh, politicians' messages won't be scanned. They'll make sure of that. Only the peons will have their messages scanned. The French law that makes it legal for the government to hack your phone has a bunch of exceptions so it's not legal for the government to hack important people's phones.

>> They'll make sure of that

No they won't. They'll never be sure if their data is secure.

https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-and-hundreds-of-german-p...

Post reply on HN